Twenty-three teams of student investigators from Manhattan's East Side Middle School -- with such names as "The Independent Variablezzz," "The Brown-Eyed Perfectionists" and "20/20" -- displayed science projects in Weill Cornell Medical College's Olin Hall March 20 for the Cornell Science Challenge Fair, a community-education program sponsored by the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and The Rockefeller University. The program, designed to train seventh-graders in the scientific method, is celebrating its 10th year.

Each year, two dozen mentors from the participating graduate schools pair with groups of four or five seventh-graders as they develop an original research project. Over the last decade, the program has mentored nearly 1,400 seventh-graders from East Side Middle School in developing hypotheses, experiments and analyses.

"The Cornell Science Challenge program has been trying to enrich these seventh-grade students with hypothesis-driven science experience and expose them to real working scientists in a top university," said Xiaoai Chen, who coordinates the program as fellowships and outreach director at the Graduate School.

The seventh-graders choose their hypotheses in January and graduate students guide them toward their research goals over the course of four visits to their schools.

"The students have taken the lead, and they've shown the initiative," said third-year Weill Cornell graduate student Sebastian Shaffer during a morning mentoring session at East Side Middle School. "You can really tell that they are interested in the question." The students designed tests to study memory, the properties of light, the effects of exercise, the sense of smell, and more.

Although Shaffer's group was analyzing data from a successful project (testing the effects of listening to music on short-term memory) some projects, such as one on growing fungus under different conditions, failed to produce data. But a lack of results can be instructive too, said East Side Principal David Getz.

"For some groups, their outcome is not at all what they wanted or what they expected," said Getz. "Working with scientists, they understand that it's pretty much par for the course and that they're being judged on their science, not on whether their hypothesis was correct. They are learning to think scientifically."

After gathering and analyzing their data, students prepared poster presentations for the Science Challenge Fair. The posters covered every aspect of the scientific process, from developing a procedure and providing informed consent to human research subjects to discussing the project's societal significance.

During the fair, students gave presentations on their projects and took tours of five Weill Cornell laboratories. Projects were judged by graduate students and winners from the previous year's competition and were given awards in categories including best scientific method, most creative and best presentation.

At the award ceremony, Randi Silver, associate dean of the Graduate School, encouraged the students to continue on their scientific journey.

"You've all done a tremendous effort, and you are the future scientists of America," said Silver. "Does science rock? Yes. Keep doing science."